Marquette University social media director used a Tweet about Pete Davidson and Ariana Grande's breakup to get people to vote

Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson are reportedly calling it quits. The couple met on "Saturday Night Live" and became engaged just weeks after making their relationship official on Instagram in May.
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Five months after the couple's whirlwind engagement (just two weeks after they started dating!), singer Ariana Grande and "Saturday Night Live" comedian Pete Davidson have called it quits.(Photo: JASON SZENES/EPA-EFE)

Tim Cigelske was just trying to make it easier for people to vote, one pop culture reference at a time.

Cigelske works at Marquette University as the social media director (full disclosure: he used to work at the Journal Sentinel). He had a plan to get people to vote using a trick from the earlier days of the internet. You get someone to click on a link that takes them to a music video of Rick Astley singing "Never Gonna Give You Up" instead of whatever it was they thought they were clicking on. It's called rickrolling.

But Cigelske got people to click on a social media post about the "real reason" Pete Davidson and Ariana Grande split up that instead took them to a voter registration page.

He posted Sunday night, by Tuesday Ashton Kutcher retweeted him. Late-night host James Corden retweeted him Tuesday evening while Cigelske was teaching a social media class at Marquette. By Thursday evening, the tweet had 6.3 million impressions and 2.3 million clicks. He's had more than 40,000 retweets and 70,000 likes. And he knows of quite a few people who actually registered to vote.

"I know that there are people who sent me their registration," said Cigelske. "People sent screenshots."

A colleague stopped Cigelske on the stairs at Marquette to say she saw his post and registered to vote. She had just moved and gotten married and didn't have a chance to register.

Cigelske initially had wanted to try that sort of click bait-style post during a Packers or Brewers game.

"It was going to be like, 'I can’t believe these Yelich stats' and get people to go to a voter page," he said. "This happened Saturday night when it took over Twitter, and I thought this is a better tweet."

"We have a college population on campus, and they don’t always know how to vote or where to vote," he said. "It's easy to criticize people who don’t know how to vote, but I think someone who hasn’t moved for 30 years doesn’t realize how confusing it can be."